Guardian Unlimited

While Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain appear anxious to move into the White House, none of them have much to say about housing. Yet rarely a day goes by that the headlines don't mention the current housing crisis and its threat to the financial markets and the economy. This has led to a strange disconnect between the presidential campaigns and national reality.

Subprime lending and the ensuing foreclosures are being blamed for the crisis, but the problems and blame… more

A series of new data and new decisions have been dribbling out of Israel recently on settlement expansion. The tarmac had barely cooled off from secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's departure earlier in the week and the Israeli government was already announcing plans to build 600 new apartments in the Givat Ze'ev settlement and the approval of 800 new units in Betar Illit. This news came in the wake of new construction plans for Har Homa in East Jerusalem and… more

It is difficult to find a westerner who does not intuitively support the idea of a free Tibet. But would Americans ever let go of Texas or California? For China, the Anglo-Russian great game for control of central Asia was neither inconclusive nor fruitless, something that cannot be said for Russia or Britain. Indeed, China was the big winner.

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Boundary agreements in 1895 and 1907 gave Russia the Pamir mountains and established the Wakhan Corridor -- the slender eastern tongue… more

This was supposed to be the year in which Benjamin Netanyahu was re-crowned King of Israel -- he looked untouchable in the polls, and sitting prime minister Ehud Olmert's days looked numbered. That might still happen, but an inauspicious start to 2008 turned downright ugly this past weekend for Netanyahu when a new political scandal broke -- with him at its epicentre. Israel TV Channel 10's Raviv Druker broke the story -- not only of profligacy and embarrassing… more

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's latest Middle East trip has drawn to a close, and she is now heading back to Washington via Brussels. On being told by a reporter at a press conference in Ramallah that this was her 13th visit, and asked whether she was bringing anything new, Condi responded that 13 is not a lucky number, so maybe she needed to come back again.

Maybe the latest round of violence between Israelis and… more

Fidel Castro is stepping down -- but will anything in US policy change?

American foreign policy is full of missed moments -- the most recent and disturbing of which was in April 2003 when Iran made a normalisation offer to the US that included putting on the table recognition of Israel, cutting its support of Hamas and Hezbollah's terrorist activities, and its nuclear programme in exchange for some gestures from the US, the most important of which was ending our regime… more

For American progressives, it's hard to name a more pressing -- or long-awaited -- goal than achieving universal health coverage. Today, prospects for that goal seem better than they have in years, if not for the fact that the Democratic presidential hopefuls are bickering over the details of how to do it.

But obsessing over universal coverage has obscured a far more complex and worrisome problem in our healthcare system, and that is the question of costs.

The United States, as we… more

Theories abound as to why an Annapolis conference and why now. Jerry Seinfeld would be excused for thinking that this is all a personal conspiracy against him -- his visit to Israel was dominating the headlines until Annapolis came along. In fact some in the Israeli media have been drawing a rather unflattering analogy: the Annapolis conference resembles a Seinfeld episode -- it's about nothing. Yada yada yada.

It's easy to be cynical, but Annapolis does matter. Israelis and Palestinians will… more

The US Senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water -- and is holding it. Before the committee's Democrats approve Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn't torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice.… more

One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons… more